Ottoman
HABSBURG MILITARY MEDIOCRITY – H-WAR
Why was the Habsburg army slower and less brilliant than its European rivals between 1649 and 1918? I am certainly no expert on this topic, having read only very generally on Austrian history, but in the interest of providing a basis of discussion, I’ll posit the following general ideas: 1) The Habsburgs were almost always broke due to shambolic…
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Napoleonic Malta
One of the many surprises Paul gave his contemporaries was his alliance with the Ottomans. This followed Admiral Nelson’s great victory over Napoleon’s fleet at Aboukir Bay, close to Alexandria, in summer 1798 (the Battle of the Nile); after this, the British were able to expel French armies from Egypt,…
THIRD BATTLE OF EDIRNE
The first bombs dropped from a heavier-than-air aircraft were grenades or grenade-like devices. Historically, the first use was by Giulio Gavotti on 1 November 1911, during the Italo-Turkish War. In 1912, during the First Balkan War, Bulgarian Air Force pilot Christo Toprakchiev suggested the use of aircraft to drop “bombs”…
Malta and the Russians
Military Parade of Emperor Paul in front of Mikhailovsky Castle painting by Alexandre Benois, taken from the art book World of Art. In the year of the foundation of Odessa, Catherine was succeeded by her son Paul, whose ambitions easily outstripped those of his mother, for she had been clever…
The Venetian Arsenal
circa.1724 Jacopo de’ Barbari, 1500 The physical demands of maintaining ships and supplying their crews tended to generate substantial supporting bureaucracies and physical infrastructure, making institutions like the Venetian Arsenal or the Tudor Council for Marine Causes more convincingly bureaucratic than those administering most contemporary armies, and naval bases like…
Belgrade – Date: 15 June-22 August 1717
Eugene of Savoy at the Battle of Belgrade by Johann Gottfried Auerbach. Eugene crowned his career with the battle of Belgrade, otter which he retired as the most successful general of the Austrian Habsburgs. This reconstruction shows the deployment of forces and the countervallation and circumvallation built by Eugene. There…
Christian Orders of Chivalry
The model for these royal adaptations was provided by the secular orders of chivalry, the earliest of which had been established in the fourteenth century, two hundred years after the emergence of the military orders. The most important of them, ‘Monarchical Orders’ such as those of the Garter, the Collar…